Walter Munk: The father of surf forecasting turns 100
In 2017, surfers right around the world depend on surf forecasting to plan their lives. The father of surf forecasting, Walter Munk, turns 100 today yet despite the debt of gratitude they owe him few surfers know his name.
Munk might be under-appreciated in surfing circles, but he’s a big deal in ocean science. He has been described as the “greatest living oceanographer” and the “Einstein of the ocean”.
His list of accolades is astounding. There is a unit of measurement named after him: the “Munk unit”. There’s a species of ray called Mobula munkiana. There’s even a Walter Munk Award for outstanding contributions to oceanography, which of course he has won.
Munk has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of ocean circulation, geology and climate change. But perhaps his most influential work is the science of wave prediction, which he developed while still a doctoral student in California.
After graduating from Caltech in 1938, Munk began a PhD with renowned Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup in the sleepy seaside town of La Jolla. Distressed by Germany’s annexation of his native Austria, Munk became a US citizen and joined the war effort, first as an army private and later with the US Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory.
Dr. Munk, left, with his mentor, Harald U. Sverdrup, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the late 1930s.
While observing Allied troops training for an amphibious invasion of Northwest Africa, Munk noticed that waves were pummelling the landing craft as they approached the beach. He immediately called Sverdrup, and together they developed techniques for predicting ocean waves and surf conditions for amphibious warfare.
Their methods were so successful that the Allied forces used these to predict wave conditions for the D-Day landings at Normandy. Based on those predictions, General Eisenhower delayed the operation, the largest naval invasion in history, until June 6, 1944. Undoubtedly, Munk’s research saved thousands of Allied lives and helped bring about the end of World War II.
A slide from a seminar Dr. Munk gave describing the forecasting challenges associated with the D Day landings at Normandy. Rarely does surfing intersect with history in such a meaningful way. To listen to the talk click here.
Thus began a lifelong fascination with ocean waves. In 1963 Munk, then a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, led a team of scientist studying how swells generated by Antarctic storms travel more than 16,000km across the Pacific Ocean.
The team set up stations to measure the waves as they travelled in a great circle from New Zealand to Alaska. Munk and his family spent more than a month in American Samoa for the experiment, monitoring pressure sensors mounted on the ocean floor and recording data on paper tape punched with holes.
The experiment yielded a surprising discovery. The waves showed very little decay in energy on their journey across the Pacific. The biggest change was a shift in the observed period of the wave – that is, the time between passing crests. Munk’s team found that the period increased as the waves moved northwards.
This happens because ocean waves are dispersive, meaning that the speed of the wave depends on the period. Long-period waves move more rapidly, so they run to the front of the pack, while shorter-period waves lag behind. The phenomenon is well known to surfers, who experience this dispersive ordering as a gradual shortening of the time between sets of waves.
In a 1967 documentary that Munk made with his wife Judith about the experiment in the Pacific, he describes how an orderly ocean swell can emerge from the chaos of an Antarctic storm. Using the analogy of tossing a handful of pebbles into a pond, Munk describes how the water surface is initially broken up in “lovely confusion”. But eventually a steady procession of ripples can be seen spreading outwards from the point of impact – regular and predictable.
'Waves Across the Pacific' Munk’s 1967 documentary about tracking Southern Ocean storms
Munk’s pioneering work on ocean swells, together with his wartime research on wave prediction, gave birth to the science of surf forecasting. In 2007 his contribution to surfing was formally recognised by the Groundswell Society, a surfing advocacy group. Munk later recalled:
"I have been fortunate in receiving the recognitions that are traditional in a scientific career. But none gave me as much unexpected pleasure as this recognition by the Groundswell Society. I was utterly delighted."
After more than eight decades of ocean science, Munk shows no signs of slowing down. He is still hard at work, researching and speaking at international conferences. As the worldwide oceanographic community prepares to celebrate his centenary, Munk’s enthusiasm for discovery has not dimmed.
In an interview this month, Munk revealed what keeps him going. “More enthusiasm than knowledge. That’s been the key of my career — to get excited before I understand it.”
//PAUL SPENCE and SHANE KEATING
This article first appeared on The Conversation
Comments
What a legend. love that last quote about being excited by what you don't understand and then using that energy to learn. An ethos to live by.
That was awesome. Love this stuff
That was so good
That was great reading. What a clever bastard
Brilliant attached documentary. I think I just learned more about swells in 32 minutes than I have in 27 years of chasing them. Maybe it was taught at school (maybe not) but it didn't seem to get through... That long period waves will move at 2x the speed of the advancing dispersed part of the swell and the leading wave continually fades back into the swell; that swell at 2 times the wavelength underwater will see a negligible roll; that as distance from source increases, so does duration of the event... incredible. Nice to re-affirm that not much energy is lost over huge distances.
And how they did it - with precise analog recording instruments they built, multiple manned survey stations across the great circle, a ship that can sit bolt upright in the ocean and not be moved. Their hand built 3d analysis of each swell would not be out of place in a modern stats program. Then collating results in a modernist beach house on top of a cliff overlooking a beautiful beach, that's a high point of civilisation.
Also refreshing was Dr Munk admitting his hypothesis for wave strength to be diluted by equatorial trades was not borne by the evidence. Bravo.
https://theconversation.com/hang-ten-decades-walter-munk-inventor-of-the...
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/symposiums/munk100/about/
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/hang-ten-decades-walter-m...
http://www.coastalwatch.com/su...egins-from-the-surfers-journal
https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/13961-walter-munk-the-father-of-surf...
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/n...ventor-surf-forecast-turns-100
https://www.surfertoday.com/su...r-of-surf-forecasting-hits-100
"I had already done some work on this subject. I later learned that (the United States) planned an amphibious landing in northwest Africa.
It was the first Allied initiative of the war. Up until then, we were responding to German initiatives.
So it was very important that we had success.
We went down to South Carolina to watch the practice exercise.
They were using LCVPs (landing craft vehicle personnel).
Whenever the LCVPs turned into the breakers — and the waves got above about five feet — the boats would broach and turn parallel to shore.
Waves would break into them.
People would get hurt.
They called it a day and said we’ll continue the practice landing when things calm down a little.
I went back and tried to find information about wave heights in northwest Africa.
I found that at certain times of year, the waves exceeded six feet.
I thought that a catastrophe was about to happen.
The only way to do something was to learn to predict waves, then pick two good days for a landing.
That had not been done.
There had never been a wave-prediction attempt.
In my agony, I called Sverdrup and said, “Could you please come help?” He had a global reputation. People would listen.
We spent about a month together thinking about how to predict waves.
We ended up doing a prediction for the northwest Africa landing using a very, very crude method.
It turned out to be a successful prediction.
We then got permission to start a wave prediction school here at Scripps. Every month, we’d get about a dozen officers who’d come work with us so that they could do predictions.
Those 100 or so students ended up predicting landings, mostly in the Pacific and mostly with success.
Question:*Where were you when the D-Day landings occurred at Normandy?
Answer: I was at Scripps and was not told of the landings. But two of our students helped predict the waves, and did a very good job.
Their first prediction was that the waves would be incredibly high, and that a landing would be impossible.
Gen. (Dwight) Eisenhower postponed the landing 24 hours.
The next prediction said the surf would still be rough, but that a landing was possible. Eisenhower decided to go for it because he didn’t want to lose the element of surprise."
http://www.sandiegouniontribun...avy-tides-2016jul01-story.html
Just got back to this with some spare time to watch the doco and read a few articles...fascinating stuff.
For some reason it reminded me of the wonderful book - Longitude by Dava Sobel.
For all off the drawbacks of war and the military industrial complex, they sure contribute through funds and research to some breakthroughs in science and knowledge.
Not sure if it was mentioned elsewhere on Swellnet but this fascinating man passed away in February, he was 101. Here's his obituary from The Times, what a life. RIP Walter Munk.
During his long and distinguished career, Walter Munk loved to get out on the ocean and take part in experiments that he devised looking at circulation and current, the study of the seafloor and the behaviour of waves. None was more important than his 1991 investigation that became known as “the sound heard around the world”.
This took place as the understanding of the full implications of climate change was still developing, and Munk wanted to devise a method of detecting whether the oceans were warming. Sound travels faster through warm water than cold, and Munk’s ambitious plan was to send sound signals around the globe from a ship in the Southern Ocean, located off Heard Island, a remote volcanic rock between Australia and Antarctica. Theoretically, these would then be picked up by receiving stations in the northern hemisphere.
Munk waited nervously to discover whether his theories were right. The experiment — partly funded by the US navy, with whom he worked throughout his career — was expensive and involved co-operation from scientists in ten countries. “I had lived that day for two years before it started,” he recalled aged 76, his accent still betraying his childhood years in his native Austria. “What would it be like? Would we be heard at all? We really didn’t know whether man-made acoustic instruments would be large enough to be received over these great distances.”
The day before the experiment was to begin, the technicians on the research vessel asked Munk if they could test the system briefly. He gave the go-ahead and went to his cabin, where he slept for several hours. When he awoke he was handed a fax from a research centre in Bermuda asking why they had started the experiment a day early. “I thought, ‘That is just wonderful.’ This question had been answered,” he said.
The experiment helped to establish a method for measuring sea temperature change. The signals from the first sound emissions had taken only three and a half hours to reach both coasts of North America.
Walter Heinrich Munk was born in 1917 in Vienna to a prominent Jewish family. His father, Dr Hans Munk, and mother, Rega Brunner, divorced when he was ten. His maternal grandfather was a politician and banker. His stepfather was head of the Austrian government’s salt-mine monopoly.
Munk learnt to ski with his Uncle Felix, his mother’s elder brother, and he enjoyed it so much that he barely paid attention at school. When he was 14 his mother decided to “exile” him, as he later put it, to Silver Bay, a prep school in New York that specialised in boys struggling to keep up. He loved it and became president of the school ski club.
The plan was for Munk to become a banker, and for three years he traded stocks at the Wall Street branch of a bank connected to the family business. He hated share-dealing, regarding it as of almost no social value. He left the bank in 1937 to take classes at Columbia University, and then attended the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Later in life Munk, a good-looking man with natural charm and an engaging twinkle in his eye, used to joke that he became an oceanographer because the only way he could afford to visit his girlfriend in San Diego was to get a job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California campus there. He joined the institution as a summer intern in 1939 and was associated with it for the rest of his life.
Also that year, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, he volunteered for the US army and became an American citizen. His tenure in the 146th Field Artillery was short, however. He was about to play a more important role in the war effort, one that would directly influence the success of the D-Day landings.
The young man who would go on to become one of the most influential oceanographers of the 20th century, dubbed by colleagues the “Einstein of the oceans”, was transferred back into civilian life at the request of his mentor, the Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup, the director at Scripps. He had recognised Munk as a brilliant student and wanted his help with classified work on anti-submarine warfare and amphibious landings for the navy.
They produced pioneering research on waves to assist military planners in selecting safe conditions for landing craft to operate. This was becoming a critical element in the war effort with landings in north Africa in prospect. Munk had watched exercises off the North Carolina coast and noticed that with wave heights of more than 6ft landing craft were at risk of capsizing, endangering the lives of soldiers.
These sorts of conditions, he estimated, occurred on two out of every three days during the winter. “I felt this was a catastrophe in the making,” he recalled many years later. “There hadn’t been an attempt to predict waves, so the only way out was really to try and make a prediction and then pick a couple of good days to get in.”
He and Sverdrup developed methods that were used by the Allies during landings on the Moroccan and Algerian coasts in 1942, and in the Pacific theatre late in the war. They were also used to help General Eisenhower and his staff plan the D-Day landings in June 1944, when bad weather in the English Channel forced a delay of 24 hours. The work of Munk and Sverdrup is regarded by the navy as having saved the lives of thousands of soldiers.
Munk’s restless and ever-inquisitive mind encompassed pioneering research in a bewildering variety of areas. As he would say at the end of his life, he was better at asking questions than providing, and working for years on, their detailed answers.
In the late 1940s he worked on wind-driven ocean circulation — he coined the term “wind-driven gyres” to describe a large system of circulating currents. He moved on to study the rotation of the Earth and its irregularities, exploring them in relation to changes in the length of day, atmospheric conditions, and ocean and tidal conditions. This produced a standard work on the subject that is still in use today.
Munk was among a number of scientists sent to the Marshall Islands in the Pacific in the early 1950s in the build-up to the testing of a nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll. His concern that an explosion of that magnitude could produce a tsunami paved the way for early-warning networks now deployed in the ocean.
In the late 1950s he led another ambitious experiment to observe waves generated by Southern Ocean storms travelling thousands of miles through the Pacific to Alaska. In 1963 he and his family spent three months living in American Samoa as he worked on a project that would play a key role in the development of the science of surf forecasting. Other areas of interest included internal waves in the ocean, occurring at the interface between horizontal regions of water of different temperature density, and the effect of tides on the mixing of the water in the ocean.
Having been taken on by Sverdrup as a doctoral student, he completed his PhD in oceanography in 1947. That year he became an assistant professor of geophysics at Scripps, and assumed a full professorship in 1954. After a sabbatical year at Cambridge University funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, he returned to Scripps and began plans to develop a branch of the Institute of Geophysics. He was director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) from 1962 to 1982.
Munk was a member of the Jason think tank (named after the mythical argonaut), an independent panel of scientists who advised the US government on defence and arms-control issues. He was a secretary of the navy and Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair from 1985 until his death. Much of his work on anti-submarine warfare remains classified.
He wrote hundreds of research papers and four books. He was garlanded with an abundance of awards and honours. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 1956 and the Royal Society in 1976 and received the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1968 and the US National Medal of Science in 1983. He had two marine species named in his honour: Mobula munkiana or Munk’s devil ray, and Sirsoe munki, a deep-sea worm.
He was married three times, first to Martha Chapin in the late 1940s. They divorced in 1953. Soon after, he married Judith Horton, who came from a prominent San Diego family and, affected by polio at 21, spent many years in a wheelchair. The family home overlooked the Pacific and the couple were inseparable. As one friend put it: “If you got Walter, you got Judy. Together, they ran the most elegant household in San Diego.” With a background in sculpture and architecture she actively participated in the expansion of the Scripps campus, helping to redesign old buildings and launch new projects, including the redwood and glass home of the IGPP.
With Judy, Munk travelled the world, including a trip across the Soviet Union in a Land Rover during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to reach an oceanographic station on the Black Sea. She died in 2006. They had three children. A daughter, Lucian, was born with a heart defect and died aged seven. Munk is survived by two other daughters, Edie and Kendall, who both campaign for the environment. He married his third wife, Mary Coakley, a community leader, in 2011. She also survives him.
Munk inspired thousands of students and fellow academics. He never stopped working, regarding his academic pursuits as an indivisible part of his life, and his curiosity never left him. A school child once asked him about his job. “I have fun,” he said, “trying to learn something about the oceans.”
Walter Munk, oceanographer, was born on October 19, 1917. He died of pneumonia on February 8, 2019, aged 101